Look, figuring out how to get what you want is the easy part. Figuring out what you want is the hard part.
I thunk up this bit of wisdom for Magdalene (The Great Mormon Novel™) when I was rasslin’ with this concept way back in 2011. A perusal of my hard drive tells me I’ve been cogitating on this since at least 1998.
Here’s the backstory:1
I have a Vomit Book. It’s where I dump my brain. I stand at the threshold of my brain and look at its Neckbeard Nest-ness and take a deep breath. Then I start to my right and go around the folds of my gray matter picking up the trash. Then I go back and do a rough sort of like with like. After that I refine.
I fill up a TOPS JEN Action Planner.2 It takes however long it takes. I’m on Book 14 since 2011. Before that, I used AT-A-GLANCE DayMinder Executive Weekly/Monthly Planner from 1999 through 2008. I scanned those and Vomit Books 1-4, then destroyed them.
So, I just write. Dump. Vomit. I tried mind-mapping for a while. That didn’t work. When I’m overwhelmed, I just write words, words that come to mind like the die in a Magic 8 Ball. There is no point. I’m just taking out the trash.
I use it for everything: narrative, to-do, dun-did, wins, losses, health/medical, affirmations/quotes, kids. It’s all color coded,3 I also have a template to copy/paste typewritten thoughts, then print, cut, and tape it into the book.
When I get to the end of one Vomit Book, I go back and read what I wrote, and, in the fresh Vomit Book, I recap. I distill sticking points in black, and note my current thoughts in green.
Recap
Yeah, that was a day, all right. That’s the first of about 4 pages of similar.
Although a lot happened, Vomit Book 13 took 2-1/2 years. I filed it away September 1 after I recapped.
Now, I’m a creature of habit. I write the same thing year after year since 1998:
- What do I really want?
- Why am I so angry?
- What brings me joy?
- Why do I feel so hopeless?
- Why am I such a perpetual fuckup?
- Why do I eat?
- Who am I?
- What is my purpose?
- Why do I think I can have success without sacrifice?
- Why am I so lazy?
- Why do I ruminate on past events only I remember?
- Why can’t I remember the good things that happen?
- Why am I fearful of success and fulfillment?
- Do I have any goals and what are they?
Occasionally, there’s something new, like menopause and how it changed me in fundamental ways. With my mom’s ordeal earlier this year, a new thought entered my brain: I am useful, but not valuable.
September 1, when I recapped the previous Vomit Book and retired it, started out no differently. Same colors, same format, same complaints, but this time I did something new. I noted things that I wanted to explore further because I had new, tiny, vague epiphanies, the first of which was “What do I really want?”
I’ve been asking that question for at least 27 years, and I finally realized that that is the wrong question, and of all the questions I’ve been asking, I had never distilled my despair to its essence and defined my terms first:
- purpose
- fulfillment
- success
where I had to determine what I thought I should want/think/feel versus what habits I actually have. You don’t work to change habits you don’t really care about. You keep the habit because it does something for you.
Useful, but not valuable.
My church teaches that one’s purpose is to serve others. You know what? I don’t like serving others. It stresses me out and I get zero joy out of it. In fact, I resent it, the work, the time, the effort. I get panicky and then once I’m alone, I melt down. Or I can throw money at it. I’m okay with that.
I don’t have a purpose. Never have had a purpose. No calling, no life’s work.4 I could take that as a sign that I should try harder, but that only makes me flagellate myself more.
Then it occurred to me: Do I have to have a purpose? Is having a purpose something I thought I should find? How many people actually have a purpose? How many people just go about their lives trying to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table? How many people go to high-paying jobs, slog through the day, go home, and mow the lawn with the occasional vacation here and there ad infinitum?
What’s wrong with going through life randomly making somebody’s day better without ever knowing it happened?
What’s wrong with being useful, but not valuable?
I had noted that I was fearful of this. I don’t remember feeling this way, but I wrote it down in early 2023, so I did a deep dive on that. After some thought, I was surprised to learn that what fulfills me is so simple:
- listening to music that speaks to me
- looking at pretty things
- making pretty things
- making pretty ebooks out of complex print design
- listening to AI-generated stories read by AI-generated voices while I work
- laying down thousands of words in one long writing session
- walking in the grass in spring
- putting things in order (e.g., filing, computer file reorganization)
- solving problems (e.g., computer issues, plot/characterization blocks, WordPress, HTML/CSS)6
That’s it. That’s what I enjoy doing. When I drifted away from what I thought I should want, which were grandiose ambitions, vestiges of a time I wanted to earn my parents’ approval and only recently realized I was never going to get it, to contemplate what I look forward to doing, I … changed.7
It took me a minute to figure out I’m already fulfilled. I’m in my happy place when I’m doing whatever I would be doing anyway.
Most people define this as winning and/or having a lot of money. When one wins, one is usually competing against something else. Except … I don’t like competing. It’s too much effort and risk and not enough payoff. I’m a sore loser and I do want to win, but winning doesn’t do anything for me. No dopamine hit, no feeling of fulfillment or success because what’s the purpose?
Money is a tool. Or, as Giselle puts it in The Proviso:
Money doesn’t solve anything. It just makes surviving less difficult.
It dawned on me that I don’t really care about money. It never occurred to me that the only thing I want money for is my basic needs, take-out, some inexpensive wants,8 an emergency fund, and maybe to be able to take off on a road trip at a moment’s notice. In short, not to be in survival mode in perpetuity.9
So this is where we get into the weeds of should want versus really want, and again, this is a vestige of what I thought my dad and/or the world viewed as success.10
I had to redefine success for myself, which was what my teenage and young adult self really wanted:
- to be a published author
- to get married
- to have children
Thus, by that measure, I’ve succeeded.11
But you see, I never looked beyond those things.
- What happens after I get The Call™?12
- What happens after the wedding?
- What happens after I see the positive pregnancy test?
I didn’t stand in front of a bookstore shelf and fantasize about my name there.
I didn’t think about what it takes to make a successful marriage.
I didn’t wonder what being pregnant would be like, holding a baby in my arms,13 or guiding them through life to be decent adults.
It’s been 15 days now since I started looking at my life in a whole new way, and I feel free. Free of the burdens of expectations I don’t even know if others held. Free of expectations I thought I should fulfill or thought I wanted to fulfill. Free of expectations going forward. Free to enjoy puttering around. Free to have a job and not a career, and enjoy just having a job that pays for my basic needs. Free to know happiness.
I’m not going to ask myself why it took me so long. I’m just going to enjoy it.
______________________________
1. The problem with my stories is I always have to start with the backstory. People get bored and don’t listen to the important part. I need to work on that.
2. I tried something different, something pretty, because I was so seduced by and envious of all the performance-art eye candy of “bujo”s and “journaling”s. That ain’t me.
3.
- narrative: blue
- to-do: orange
- dun-did: green
- recap pull-out: black
- recap current: green
- wins: teal
- moved: teal
- medical: purple
- quotes: pink
- future blog topics: pink
- XX: teal
- XY: red
- computer problems: red
- miscellaneous: lime
- to-do cross-out: blue highlight
If you don't think Pilot Precise V5 rollerball pens are objectively the Best Pens Ever™, you are objectively wrong.
Mr. Pen gel highlighters. Don't use regular highlighters. Your ink will smear.
Tags and flags, man. Tags and flags.
4. One could make the argument that my writing is my life’s work, but that’s a compulsion. It’s part of who I am. It’s what I do.
5. This ties into the quest for happiness, and the difference between contentment, happiness, and joy.
6. I don’t like having to solve computer problems while I’m in the middle of something else.
7. Useful, but not valuable.
8. Temu is my jam.
9. I have tried and failed to figure out what I’d do with a massive windfall. Not a new car, because those come with computers and surveillance and bells’n’whistles I do not want. Not a house, because I’ve been down that road and it nearly destroyed us. Traveling, maybe; certainly, a trip to Spain and a Caribbean cruise. What I’d really like to be able to do is find and help people who have too much to qualify for government aid, but not prosperous enough to get out of whatever mess they’re in. If there are charities for that, I don’t know about them.
10. I don’t think my dad would’ve been happy with anything I did or succeeded at. I’m not sure he knew what he wanted from me. Or maybe he didn’t want anything at all except I not turn out to be a fuckup. I could be Bill Gates and my mom wouldn’t find that to be at all significant or impressive in any way. Useful, not valuable.
11. I self-published, so I still have a teeny tiny feeling of having cheated. That cult got its claws into me early and hard.
12. Wherein the editor at Harlequin/Silhouette would call me to say they’d like to publish my book.
13. That turned out to be pretty damned awesome.